Friday, 24 June 2016

Time has flown since my first day as a cataloguing archivist
for our project ‘Cataloguing Norman Dott’s neurosurgical case notes (1920-1960)’,
and it has now been five months since I started cataloguing the case notes. As
of today Friday 24th of June, I have catalogued 3,584 case notes
using the XML editor Oxygen, which represents an average of 36 per day. If we
take into account the case notes catalogued by other archivists, interns
and volunteers, we reach an impressive total number of 26,840 records! We are
not out of the woods just yet though: I still have around 19 boxes of case
notes to catalogue. As the deadline for the project is rapidly approaching, the cataloguing pace has to increase, however we are ready
to rise to the challenge.

It is now time to start thinking about the next step: the
delivery of the online catalogue that will enable the public to actually see
and use the collection. However, the case notes contain a lot of confidential
and sensitive data, and we have to be careful in our approach. There will be
two catalogues: a redacted version where all the information that could
possibly identify a patient has been redacted, and an unredacted version for
users who obtained the authorisation to view this information. Ideally, the
redacted version would be a public catalogue that everyone would be able to see
on ArchivesSpace, with a webpage specifically dedicated to the project – see the
Towards Dolly project, also based at the Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections and funded by
the Wellcome Trust's Research Resources scheme. The delivery of the unredacted
catalogue will be somewhat more complicated as access will be severely
restricted. One solution would be to only let users search it at the CRC under
LHSA archivists’ supervision, on an access-restricted laptop from which it
would be impossible to export any data.

The online delivery
of the catalogue and its publicizing represent another
aspect of the project and will bring different challenges that promise to be
equally interesting. Aline brodin, Project Cataloguing Archivist for the Norman Dott project.

Friday, 17 June 2016

This week saw us celebrate World Blood Donor Day, an international celebration of the
miracle of blood donation and transfusion. The theme for this year was the idea
that ‘blood connects us all’. In this week’s blog Alice examines how that
sentiment was quite literal in the early days of blood transfusion, and how the celebration of donors plays a central role...

When we consider what an
integral role blood transfusion plays in modern medicine, it’s surprisingly to think about how new the practice is. Although interest in the idea is evident as far back as the 17th century,
it wasn’t until the late 19th century that practitioners began to experiment
with it in a more serious way.

There were a number of factors
that made blood transfusion a fairly impossible procedure to carry out. Firstly,
it wasn’t until Karl Landsteiner identified the different blood groups in 1900 that
the interactions between these blood types were understood. He established that
if a transfusion of an incompatible blood type is given, there can be fatal
consequences as the two sets of cells attack each other. Landsteiner’s
discovery minimised this risk.

Andrew Crosbie demonstrating sterilization methods [GD14A/4/12]

A second barrier to blood
transfusion becoming an established procedure was the problem of finding a
suitable donor. With no central register of donors this had to be done on a
patient-by-patient basis, and often family members and friends were asked
first. Even if a compatible donor was found, they would then have to be brought
to the patient’s side – quite literally, that is, for the biggest barrier to
successful transfusions was that of clotting. In modern medicine,
anticoagulants are added to blood to prevent clotting and allow blood to be
stored and transported, but earlier problem-solvers took a much more hands-on
approach. Donor and recipient would have to lie alongside one another, with the
donor’s “left arm grasping the patient’s left arm well above the elbow”, and
the giving and receiving veins actually stitched together. This must have been
a very distressing experience for all involved, not least impractical and
dangerous, and early blood donors would probably understand more than most the
sentiment behind ‘blood connects us all’…

Donors in the Clinical Laboratory being supervised by Dr McRae (Director) and Miss Wilkinson.[GD14A/4/6]

Thankfully, huge leaps forward were
to be made over the years: swift transfers using syringes went some way towards
progress, and wax-lined containers such as the ‘Kimpton tube’ reduced the need
for donor and recipient to be in the same room together. Clotting remained very
much an issue, however, and as there was still no possibility of the blood
banks that we know, finding available and compatible donors was a huge problem.

Local attempts to mitigate this
began with a man called J. R. Copland. In January 1930, horrified to learn that
a friend’s wife had died because no blood donor could be found in time, Copland
made the first moves towards establishing a register of donors who could be
relied upon in times of need. Copland managed to enlist twenty-four individuals
within two months but this was not nearly enough. There were still too many
instances when donors could not be fetched in time, and medical staff and
students of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh had to step in often instead.

J.R. Copland[GD14A/3/20]

Some of these students had already
recognised the need for a register of donors and made their own attempts to
address this. Also in January 1930, three of them – D.M. Blair, A. Desmond
Stoker and W.I.C. Morris – proposed to establish a group of donors specifically
to be called upon by the RIE, and initially managed to recruit about eighteen
individuals, mostly other students. This group ran for about two years before
the students graduated and moved away, resulting in dwindling numbers of
donors.

From the Minutes of the Board of Management of the RIE. [LHB1/1/64]

Both A Desmond Stoker and J.R.
Copland embodied a central tenant of the donor system as we have it now. Stoker
was Type 0, considered a ‘universal’ donor and able to give his blood to any recipient
without adverse reaction He gave ten pints of blood before being warned by
other medical professionals of the potential harm he was causing himself!
Similarly, in one report of his service, Copland reported that “one organiser”
(most likely Copland himself) “has given fourteen pints”. Both men were of the
opinion that blood donation should be an act of charity, with blood offered and
received freely. When a meeting was called in June 1936 to establish a centralised
Blood Transfusion Service “in order that this important work might be carried
on in future”, the question was raised of whether donors should be paid for their
service. This was rejected, and the idea that donations “should be the free
will offering of men who love their fellow mortals” was heartily expressed.

Publicity posters.[GD14/14/13/2]

That is not to say, however, that
this gift has gone unappreciated. The letters of thanks received by
the service demonstrate the gratitude and indebtedness that both recipients and
their family have felt throughout the years. As the writer of this particular
letter remarks, “I know that all donors give their services for the benefit of
others and without thought of thanks or reward: but I cannot help thinking that
the knowledge of the recovery they have helped to bring about must be a
pleasure to them”.

A letter of thanks written to a donor, in J.R. Copland's correspondence files. [GD14/11/2]

Recognising the unique gift that donors
offer has always played a crucial part in the operation of the service, as can
be seen the issuing of badges to commemorate milestone donations. World Blood
Donor Day gives us another opportunity to celebrate donors and their
contribution to modern medicine. You can find out more about registering as a blood donor on the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Association website.

___SourcesMasson, A. H. B. (1985). History of the Blood Transfusion Service in Edinburgh.

Friday, 10 June 2016

Collection care is a big part of our responsibility for LHSA:
we work hard to ensure that our holdings are safe, but we also need to prepare
in case something outside our control goes wrong. It’s easy to think it will
never happen to you, but the recent Glasgow School of Art fire shows that no-one
is immune to disaster, and we need to be ready to deal with any problems that
may face our collections calmly and efficiently.

The last few months have seen a lot of work on the
University’s Disaster Response and Recovery Plan, which also covers LHSA’s
collections. Much of this work has seen new additions to the Plan itself: freshly-written sections provide suggested responses to various possible scenarios, and
checklists for key members of a response team have been expanded, to name just a
few improvements. It’s not all been additions to a Word document though,
there’s been some hands-on activity too!

This week I helped provide a bit more practical
infrastructure to our Plan, mainly to improve access to useful materials and
equipment, with the assembly of grab bags for those members of staff who are
most likely to lead a response effort. The grab bags are full of useful pieces
of kit including protective clothing (shoes, gloves etc.) and practical
equipment like torches and stationery (including a LHSA pencil!).

We produced grab bags for eight members of staff and
several, smaller, bags to be kept in strategic positions in our building. The
images show the staff grab bags (complete with wellies, safety shoes and hard hats)
immediately below, and then the smaller grab bags in various stages of construction.

One of the bigger staff grab bags is for me, so now to find
somewhere to stash it at home!

Friday, 3 June 2016

Outreach at LHSA recently has centred on the significant contribution of women to Edinburgh's medical life. In the first of two blogs on women and medical work, Louise looks at the history of the Medical Women's Federation in our region:

Last month, we were invited to take along a small archive display to the Spring Conference
of the Medical Women’s Federation (MWF) in Edinburgh. MWF developed from the
Association of Medical Women, a group of nine female physicians set up in 1879,
which in fact comprised most qualified women at that time. As provincial
associations were set up, it became clear that a Federation was needed to
represent both female doctors and their patients, particularly following
prejudices against qualified women who had offered their services during the
First World War. Articles of Association for MWF were drawn up in 1917.

The archive of the Scottish Eastern Association (SEA) of the
MWF was donated to LHSA in 2012 and has been recently catalogued. As we near
the 2017 centenary of MWF’s foundation, our display reflected how
the Federation functioned at a local level in a historic medical city: from
interaction with clinical debates, to supporting doctors in education and
practice, forming social and professional communities, and fighting for
workplace equality for female physicians.

The concerns of the national Federation through the years
are reflected by the SEA archive at a local level, including contributions to
often-controversial debates affecting women’s health, such as birth control. This is the first page of the earliest SEA committee minutes that we
have, from 1928. MWF’s active roles in women’s health and education are
reflected here, from arranging teaching on birth control practices to
organising study groups to mark the centenary of prominent health and social
reformer Josephine Butler (1828 - 1906). Butler was primarily known for her
campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts, which permitted forced
examination of sex workers in an attempt to control venereal disease:

Issues around equal pay and opportunity are also strongly
represented in SEA papers, along with members’ leading role in campaigns around
staffing in, and against the closure of, Edinburgh’s two women’s hospitals
(Bruntsfield Hospital and Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital). For
example, MWF campaigned against the ‘marriage bar’ in the 1930s, which required the resignation of working women upon marriage:

Central MWF position on the ‘marriage
bar’, 1934 (GD51/1/2/1)

Campaigns for equality and opportunity went on into the
second half of the twentieth century. In 1972, a ‘retainer scheme’ was
introduced for female doctors who could not work a full-time week due to family
commitments. Professional subscriptions were subsidised by the scheme, in
return for a commitment from participants to keep abreast of current practice
with continual professional development. From 1976, the SEA supported women on
the Retainer Scheme attending morning medical lectures with a crèche staffed by
volunteers:

Programmes for morning lectures for doctors on the 'Retainer Scheme', supported by MWF creche, 1990s (GD51/8/1)

However, it wasn’t all work and no play for MWF members. One
thing that really stands out from the SEA archive is that members were so organised that even their social events were recorded and archived in detail! This is one of the most popular items from the display - an invitation to a party with a rather strange blend of entertainment:

We also brought along some material from our women’s
hospitals collections to the display, bringing home the connections between MWF
and the women who were instrumental in shaping hospital care in our region, such as Gertrude Herzfeld, the first practising female surgeon in Scotland:

Gertrude Herzfeld in 1924 at Bruntsfield Hospital. She was a member of the SEA from 1920s and served nationally as MWF President from 1948 to 1950 (LHB8/17/1).

Lothian Health Services Archive holds the historically important local records of NHS hospitals and other health-related material.
We collect, preserve and catalogue these records and promote them to increase understanding of the history of health and for the benefit of all.

Use of images from LHSA collections

We can provide images from items in our collections, subject to various conditions. Images are provided for private study or non-commercial research, and cannot be used for other purposes unless you request and receive written permission from LHSA to do so.

If you wish to use any images that have been featured on this blog, please contact us at lhsa@ed.ac.uk and we will be happy to discuss permissions with you.